Four short links: 10 February 2014

Sterling Zings, Android Swings, Data Blings, and Visualized Things.

Bruce Sterling at transmediale 2014 (YouTube) — “if it works, it’s already obsolete.” Sterling does a great job of capturing the current time: spies in your Internet, lost trust with the BigCos, the impermanence of status quo, the need to create. (via BoingBoing)

No-one Should Fork Android (Ars Technica) — this article is bang on. Google Mobile Services (the Play functionality) is closed-source, what makes Android more than a bare-metal OS, and is where G is focusing its development. Google’s Android team treats openness like a bug and routes around it.

Featured Video

Is Privacy Becoming a Luxury Good? — Julia Angwin discusses how much she has spent trying to protect her privacy, and raises the question: do we want to live in a society where only the rich can buy their way out of ubiquitous surveillance?

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